2000fish's Blog – Steve Wozniak's hunt for fish species

DATELINE: FEBRUARY 7, 2023 – ST. LUCIA, SOUTH AFRICA

It was pleasing to think that we were not even half done with our South Africa trip, and that we were just entering the tropics, where we could expect even more variety. The Cape province had been especially kind to us, but now we were now entering what I expected to be a reef fish free-for-all.

Travel was easy. A car service dropped us back at Capetown, and we made an easy connection through the vast Johannesburg airport.

In the car to Capetown, Dom actually slept. This may be the only time I’ve seen him sleep.

In Johannesburg, I realized we were only a short drive from the grave of “Breaker” Morant, one of my favorite characters in Australian history, and the subject of one of the greatest movies ever made.

Yes, that’s Edward Woodward, “The Avenger.” He also played a terrifyingly righteous Ghost of Christmas Present in George C. Scott’s “Scrooge.”

An hour later, we landed in Durban. There was a car waiting to pick us up and take us to a lovely hotel, where we slept until Red Bull call on the 4th.

Our guide, Mark de la Hey, was waiting for us in the lobby. A pleasant, knowledgeable guy, Mark was very interested in our species hunt and how he could add to it. We had a lot of driving to do before we could get a line in the water, most of it through game preserves. We got to see most of the cast of The Lion King, some of it uncomfortably close.

There were zebras everywhere, wildebeest on every road, and cape buffalo everywhere you didn’t want them.

Cape Buffalo are terrifying.

And that really African-looking tree that always seems to have lions nearby.

From a respectful distance, we saw lions, giraffes, and elephants. Dom and I would have skipped all this stuff to get fishing more quickly, but that was the route to our first stop. The place names in this area are only slightly less confusing than Hawaii, so for simplicity’s sake, we would be fishing generally around Richard’s Bay.

By late afternoon, we had set up in our lodge, and were racing down to the beach. The place looked glorious if crowded, but we could still get a line wet. We tried set baits out on the surf, but that didn’t seem to attract much attention, so we scaled down and fished the lagoon.

It was a gorgeous place, until we found out how dangerous it was.

By dark, I had added three new species – the wandering seabream, the slender glassy, and the grooved mullet.

The seabream is a close relative of species I’ve caught in Australia, Taiwan, and Qatar. Thanks to Dr. Jeff Johnson for the ID.

The glassy.

And the grooved mullet, proof again that many mullet species will eventually eat shrimp.

It was only on exiting the lagoon to the main road that we discovered the place was supposed to be full of crocodiles and hippos.

No wonder we had the place to ourselves.

People were concerned about the crocodiles, but downright terrified of the hippos – these otherwise cute beasts are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than all other mammals combined. They are bigger than you would imagine, faster than you would think, and grouchier than Marta when I wake her up at 2am to discuss a rec league hockey game.

Not wanting to face off with a hippo in the dark, we decided to head back to the lodge and figure out dinner. It was then, just when all seemed right with the world, we discovered that Dom’s phone was missing. Whether someone took it off his bag on the beach or it just fell out, it was gone.

Dom’s phone may still be somewhere on this beach.

Until you are in Africa and have no cell phone, you have no idea of how reliant we are on these devices. All of Dom’s travel arrangements, hotels, schedule, payment details, contact information, and photos of the striped galjoen – were all gone, and we had a week to go. I am glad it was him rather than me only because I would have had a complete meltdown and been unable to function. Dom actually handled it all very well, using a combination of good attitude, my phone, and occasional hotel internet to work everything out. The guy was truly Zen when he needed to be.

The morning came quickly, and once I made sure there were no leopards on my porch, I joined the guys to head down to the water.

The group prepares to do battle.

Mark can be reached via the number above or Facebook. He was awesome.

I also got a gut-wrenching answer to a question I had been asking myself – where is the harbor? Well, there wasn’t one. We were doing what is called a “surf launch,” in which the boat is shoved into the shallows via tractor and left to fend for itself.

Preparing for the process. Even Dom looks concerned.

The boat before us being pushed out into the wash.

This was safe enough inside a reef, but the fishing was outside the reef, which meant driving at great speed along wavelines until we could find a relatively safe place to jump out into the open water.

For video of our first launch, click here. The really exciting stuff happens after 2:00. A few screen grabs – 

That’s us, catching air. This would have been the exact moment I discovered religion.

The moment after we caught air. Note we are not visible. If you figure I’m six feet tall and that the rods are seven feet above my head, that means we fell at least 13 feet.

While they do this safely every day, I was terrified. (Go on Youtube and search “surf launch fails” sometime.)

Soon enough, we were out in safe water – there was a fairly large swell but they were spaced out nicely, so I stopped screaming by the time we approached the fishing grounds. We pulled out sabikis to catch live bait, which is always good fun, and in this process, I added two new species – the shortfin scad and the yellowfin goatfish.

The scad.

The goat. I already had five species and we hadn’t used anything but sabikis.

We then moved onto the structure and started casting baits and lures. I already had a lot of the main predators that live here, so I was disciplined and stayed with smaller rigs, but Dom was having a blast getting red bass and all the other stuff that crowds tropical reefs from here to Tahiti.

Dom and a nice Red Bass. Do NOT eat these – they seem to attract ciguatera like no other species.

His first GT. As good of a day as it was for me, it was epic for Dom – it was his first crack at a lot of these gamefish.

And a coronation trout. It’s not a trout, it’s a grouper, but Australians messed up common names for everything, and South Africa seemed to follow. I remember the sheer joy of catching all these, and it was a delight to relive it all watching Dom.

He also tried dropping a big live bait and was promptly slammed and broken off by a big grouper. This would become a theme.

One of the better photos of Dom losing a grouper. There were many to choose from.

I caught dozens of snappers, groupers, and emperors, mostly repeat customers, but the action was non-stop. One of the first fish I pulled up was a familiar face – the bridled triggerfish, which I have caught in eight countries. This one looked solid, so I weighed it, and to my conflicted joy, I had broken my own record, caught in Kenya in 2018.

That was four for the trip.

Here and there, I would tack on a species. The first two new ones were emperors, to my great surprise – I thought I had gotten almost all of them.

First came the yellowfin emperor.

And then the Natal.

While I was doing this, Dom was racking up an impressive batch of catches and had also hooked and lost several more groupers. I figured it was only a matter of time until he got one the right size.

Somewhere in there, my tendency to get target-fixated cost us a couple of hours. Dom and I noticed that a chub-looking fish would occasionally come up behind the boat in small schools. No matter what we threw to them, they would show brief interest and then sink back into the depths. Mark told us “Yeah, they do that. We don’t really catch them.” I was not to be deterred. I tried increasingly smaller baits and finally went weightless – the fish came close but still wouldn’t hit. Mark suggested bread – we had a loaf of white bread in our provisions. He tossed in the crusts and the fish tore through them – we had our solution. But we still had to execute. Dom got one first, and then I managed to miss at least five good hits before I hooked up. It was a nervous couple of minutes, but we landed it, and I had my fifth species of the day – the knifeback seabream.

Locally called a “Christie,” this was one of the hardest fish to hook on the entire trip. It was also an open world record, so that was two for the day and five for the trip. (And species 2142.) Note that Dom’s was bigger.

Meanwhile, Dom had hooked a huge grouper and was in the process of getting rocked up. If grouper fishing was the Indy 500, Dom would be Mario Andretti. Except that Andretti finally won once.

There were also lots of other great reef fish I had gotten before. This one is a tomato cod.

Late in the day, we were starting to pack up, and Dom and I both were squeezing in a few last drops. As soon as I hit the bottom with a cut bait, I got absolutely slammed. I snapped up instinctively, which Martini would have reminded me was a bad idea with a circle hook, but I somehow still latched onto the fish. It shook hard from side to side and was tough to wrench off the bottom, but I finally got it out of the reef and headed toward the boat. Moments later, even Mark let out a small gasp of surprise.

It was a Scotsman seabream, a rarity that wasn’t even on our wish list – it was more in the “wildest dreams” category. I have no idea why it’s called that – this would be pretty far from Scotland and it doesn’t look like any Scottish people I’ve ever met. 

Dom had just mentioned hoping for one at dinner the night before, and here I was with likely the only one we would see on the trip. I felt bad. But not that bad. Dom had the striped galjoen and the redfinger.

Then Dom hooked another huge grouper and had his line unceremoniously snapped. It was time to go, but six species in a day doesn’t happen for me very often.

Although I had brought a bunch of REI freeze-dried food, the pizza at the lodge was excellent. 

By our third day, the seas had gotten a bit swellier, and Mark was concerned about launching. He told us we would probably survive, but that we would have several moments where we would question this. He was absolutely right. It took about ten minutes to find the right swell to jump, and we got fully airborne – at least the outboards roaring drowned out my screams. 

Once we got offshore, the swell was simply too big to fish effectively – although Dom managed to hook a big grouper and break it off. We decided to head in, and it was the same terror, but in reverse. And remember, because there is no ramp, the skipper simply powers the boat at top speed on to the sand. 

This was equally terrifying.

Look at the surf we had to get through.

Mark had a great “Plan B.” We headed to a set of tidepools down the coast a bit, and even though the water was slowly coming up, we had a couple of hours of great fun.

Steve and Dom prepare to hunt the tidepools.

We saw dozens of rockpool denizens, and I ended up adding four new species.

The first was a fiveband flagtail, a close relative of the Hawaiian flagtails that Jamie Hamamoto helped me catch.

I then caught the stonebream, a species Dom had gotten on our first day in Vleesbai. These come up into just a few inches of foamy water as the tide rises.

Now I just needed a striped galjoen and a redfinger.

The other two species were blennies that we hunted down in quiet pools above the wash.

The maned blenny.

And the horned rockskipper.

This took the count for this part of South Africa to 13 in just three days. Dom got everything I did, plus a nice peppered moray – a species that ranges all the way to Hawaii. (As featured in “The Eels of Justice” blog episode.) We saw three of them, crawling out of the water over the rocks to get to squid we had placed in the water to attract blennies.

It always pays to keep your eyes open.

The next day, February 7, we had some driving to do, so we spent the morning fishing some inshore reefs off the boat, mercifully with a less dramatic launch. We found some great structure, and hammered all kinds of beautiful reef fish – Dom scored a bunch of stuff that was already on my list, so his total was staying roughly twice mine.

A blue and yellow grouper – I’d gotten one in the Maldives in 2016.

I did add one new fish – the slinger seabream.

This one would also qualify as a world record – the 6th of the South Africa trip.

I almost forgot to mention that Dom hooked a big grouper, which promptly buried in the rocks and broke him off. He also had a big bronze whaler shark on for at least half an hour on a heavy mono rig. We figured the whole time it would eventually bite through it, but heartbreakingly, the hook just pulled. I felt awful – Dom isn’t The Mucus or Jamie, so I take no joy in him losing something I’ve already caught.

When we beached the boat, Dom and I worked the sandy flats for an hour or so. Dom continually caught largespotted dart, a pompano relative, but no matter how close I fished to him and how I rigged exactly the same as he did, they would not bite for me. So Dom just handed me his rod and let me cast it, and of course, I promptly caught one.

Fish psychology is often a mystery.

Looking down the beach. Mark mentioned that there are crocodiles, and that was it for the shore fishing.

So we had been at it four days, and I had tacked on three world records and 15 species, meaning that I had 32 species and six records for the trip so far. Dom had at least 70 new fish, including that striped galjoen, the redfinger, and then some damn scorpionfish I’ll probably never catch. We had three more days, working our way south into waters that would hold new groups of fish, and as we sat down to a magnificent steak that evening, we agreed things were pretty darn good. He called Tracy on my phone (kissy-face, kissy face,) and I checked in with Marta, who faintly admitted to missing me, mostly because she wanted a couch moved.

Steve